At Salesforce Event NCY
Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff said he was going to be fast today at his company’s customer, press and analyst briefing in New York. This was, of course, the right approach for an audience of time starved New Yorkers.
Most of the presentation, a new one written by Marc himself and revised over what they tell me was a couple of weeks, was Benioff’s answer to multi-tenant critics and especially competitors who have been nipping at the heels of on-demand or SaaS computing for the last several years.
Benioff’s message was that multi-tenant is not a nice thing to have but essential. You can’t divorce mutlti-tenant from the benefits of low cost, scalable and highly deployable solutions. For example, some vendors have brought to market solutions that implement some of the gains from on-demand such as stateless computing and browser-based user interfaces. To make Benioff’s point, the company was happy to dive deep into new service and support ideas that access user acceptance from Facebook and now Twitter. The ideas might have been exposed at earlier Salesforce events but the detail provided today was new.
There was also a short discussion about the architecture, which was illuminating for some and over the top for others. Bottom line, the architecture is rather efficient, using fewer than 50 servers and ten databases across three data centers around the world.
I will have more to write about tomorrow but for now, I have to get back to note taking.
Time to build your communities
Happy New Year! Let’s be counter intuitive for a moment, shall we?
We’re in a recession and we all know it. Traditionally (and sadly) in an economic downturn when companies seek to lower their expenses they cut their marketing budgets, and why not? Marketing costs money and if you believe your marketing messages will fall on deaf ears in a slowdown, then you certainly won’t want to spend money on marketing programs so cutting marketing makes sense.
Before you run out and fire everyone or slash the budget to the point that stamps are rationed by the CEO, consider something else. Marketing is essential to promoting your ideas and even in a recession, promoting your ideas is a powerful tool for doing business now and down the road.
Slashing the marketing budget might have been a reasonable idea back in the last big recession—the one that happened before the fax machine was big news—but in today’s world, with fabulous communications and dirt-cheap ways of reaching people, it makes sense to think twice about marketing cuts.
There are three things that marketing—alone or in conjunction with sales—can do to help you make the downturn as shallow as possible for your bottom line. In no particular order, they are: spreading your thought leadership, showing your customers that you are involved in their success a.k.a. doing the right thing and building communities that will drive your inevitable upturn.
Thought leadership
So your customers aren’t buying more of what you provide. They bought from you once because they think you are the best at what they need you for and you want them to keep thinking that way for two reasons. First, if you manage to provide them with ideas for maximizing their business with and without the use of your products and services you’ll at least get to the point where they place a replenishment order. Also, keeping the customer’s mind occupied with thoughts of you will keep them from looking around for brand X because it’s cheaper.
Do the right thing
More importantly, though, sticking with your customer by showing you understand and are involved with their success is a great way to build bonds and to show them concretely that you are the real deal. Historically, sales people were almost exclusively relied on to provide the thought leadership and show involvement but two problems come with that approach. Sales people sell, which is tactical, they aren’t great at the thought leadership and doing the right thing because these are strategic activities. Stopping by with donuts might be the closest a sales representative can come to being strategic, but how many times can that work before the customer gets fat or annoyed or both? No body likes to have to say ‘no’ as in “No we aren’t buying that today” so don’t make them say now when it’s just as easy to get them to say ‘yes’ to becoming involved in a community.
Building communities
Now is a great time for marketing and sales to work together to build customer communities. A good community takes a bit of time and effort for the organizer and for the attendees and while no one would like to admit it, in a slack period, time is something we all have in a bit more abundance.
What does a community do? It brings together customers on a periodic basis—once or twice a month—to trade ideas about current use and future need. Smart sales and marketing people will look at a community as a laboratory where they can test ideas for products and messages, and to just listen.
Communities are gold in a slump because they enable customers to share the Kool-Aid, which is a natural thought leadership conduit. Communities also give the customer better insight into you and your products and, if you are doing your thought leadership job properly, they set the stage for your recovery by identifying needs for existing products and services as well as needs for new ones.
Marketing departments are the natural and rightful places for much of this activity and married with effective sales representation they can do a lot to keep the valley of a slump from turning into a crater. So while you might be thinking about cutting your marketing budget, also consider how you can redeploy some of those resources to prepare for the upturn.
